Entity vault (GBrain-compatible) workflow

A personal memory for the people, companies, and meetings in your world. Each one gets its own page that an AI keeps up to date as you learn more, and you can correct anything by hand. Works with Garry Tan's gbrain if you use it, but doesn't need it.

An Entity vault (GBrain-compatible Markdown) is a Markdown brain organized around typed dossiers: people, companies, meetings, concepts, originals, and media. Each person, company, and concept dossier has two zones:

Compiled truth — the current synthesis, rewritten as evidence changes.
Timeline — append-only evidence bullets, dated and attributable.

Meetings, originals, and media stay raw records.

OpenKnowledge scaffolds and edits that Markdown. Garry Tan's gbrain, if you install it, can import/sync the same vault and add its DB-backed retrieval, graph extraction, embedding, and automation. OK does not replace gbrain; it gives GBrain-style Markdown brains a human cockpit for review, correction, attribution, and Git-visible edits.

Founders and investors get a second brain over people, companies, meetings, and concepts — a network that's queryable, not just a pile of source documents. Agents maintain the dossiers while you keep final editorial control, so wrong claims get corrected by hand rather than trusted blindly. If you already run gbrain, this is a visual editor layer over the Markdown it indexes; if you don't yet, the GBrain-compatible Markdown shape is portable, so adopting that engine later is never a migration.

The division of labor

Layer	OpenKnowledge	Garry Tan's `gbrain`
Markdown files	Creates, edits, reviews, templates, folder guidance	Imports/syncs as source material
Human correction	WYSIWYG/source editor, activity attribution, version checkpoints	Sees corrections after import/sync
Agent writes	OK MCP tools (`write`, `edit`, `links`, `checkpoint`, `search`, `exec`)	GBrain MCP/skills if you choose to run them separately
Search/retrieval	OK project search and graph tooling	PGLite/Postgres, embeddings, hybrid retrieval, graph/index automation
Interop contract	Plain Markdown + Git	`gbrain import` / `gbrain sync --repo`

What the pack creates

Seeding needs an initialized project — run ok init first. Pick Personal CRM in the starter-pack picker, or run:

ok seed --pack entity-vault

By default the pack suggests a vault/ subfolder and creates:

your-project/
└── vault/
    ├── USER.md
    ├── SOUL.md
    ├── ACCESS_POLICY.md
    ├── HEARTBEAT.md
    ├── log.md
    ├── people/
    ├── companies/
    ├── meetings/
    ├── concepts/
    ├── originals/
    └── media/

Each folder includes an .ok/frontmatter.yml description that agents see during file listings/searches, plus templates under .ok/templates/.

Seeding also installs a skill

ok seed --pack entity-vault installs the Entity vault project skill into your agent editors (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode). It's the "how to work here" guidance behind the dossier conventions — compiled-truth vs. append-only timeline, path-qualified links, the correction loop — read automatically, and editable like any other doc. It lands as a single SKILL.md in your repo under .ok/skills/, symlinked into the skills folder of each editor already set up for the project. See Skills and what OpenKnowledge writes to disk.

Markdown shape

A person dossier generated from the pack starts in a GBrain-compatible shape:

---
type: person
title: Jane Founder
created: 2026-05-12
author: mike
tags: [person, founder]
---

## Compiled truth

Co-founder and CEO of [[companies/jane-co|Jane Co]]. Met through
[[people/alex-seed-investor|Alex Seed Investor]]. Strong on cost-per-token
economics; go-to-market is still developing.

--- timeline ---

## Timeline

- **2026-05-12** | [[meetings/2026-05-12-jane-founder-coffee|coffee meeting]] | @mike — Jane described Jane Co's agent-runtime observability wedge. Confidence: direct note.
- **2026-05-13** | agent enrichment | @agent — Public GitHub profile confirms prior OSS profiler work. Confidence: external profile.

Compatibility details:

Use document frontmatter title: and type:.
Prefer path-qualified wikilinks where identity matters: [[people/jane-founder|Jane Founder]], [[companies/jane-co|Jane Co]].
Keep the compiled-truth section rewritable.
Separate compiled truth from the timeline with a --- timeline --- sentinel line.
Keep timeline entries append-only and dated: - **YYYY-MM-DD** | source | @author — event. Confidence: ....

Get meetings in from a recorder

OpenKnowledge does not record meetings. Bring any recorder that speaks MCP, and each meeting lands in meetings/ as markdown, ready for the loop below. Ask for them on demand, or have them sync automatically.

See Ingest meetings for the recorder list, the source and source_meeting_id addressing rule, and the scheduled and event-driven options.

Worked loop: meeting → dossiers → human correction

Create meetings/2026-05-12-jane-founder-coffee.md from the meeting template.
Write raw notes with path-qualified links:

---
type: meeting
title: Jane Founder coffee
date: 2026-05-12
attendees: [Jane Founder]
tags: [meeting, ai-infra]
---

## Notes

Jane runs [[companies/jane-co|Jane Co]], a stealth AI infra company focused on
[[concepts/agent-runtime-observability|agent-runtime observability]].
Introduced by [[people/alex-seed-investor|Alex Seed Investor]].

Quote: "the agent runtime is the new kernel."

Ask your MCP-capable agent:

From meetings/2026-05-12-jane-founder-coffee.md, create or update the
referenced person, company, and concept dossiers using the Entity vault (GBrain-compatible Markdown) templates. Append dated timeline bullets. Do not rewrite existing timeline entries.

Review the agent edits in OK. If the agent inferred something wrong, correct it in the editor.
Commit the Markdown changes.

The core value is the correction loop: the durable memory is not hidden in a model context window or database row. It is a file you can inspect, edit, diff, and roll back.

Interop with Garry Tan's `gbrain`

If you also run gbrain, point it at the same Markdown vault after OK has written the files:

gbrain import ~/your-ok-vault --no-embed
gbrain embed --stale
gbrain sync --repo ~/your-ok-vault

Recommended operating model:

Use gbrain import ... --no-embed for the first bulk load when you want to avoid embedding during the scan.
Run gbrain embed --stale after import or after any no-embed sync.
Commit OK changes, then run gbrain sync --repo ~/your-ok-vault for incremental refresh.
Keep OK as the place where humans inspect/correct the Markdown.
Keep gbrain as the engine that indexes, searches, extracts graph/timeline data, and runs its own automation.

No file collision is required: OK writes Markdown; gbrain reads/imports/syncs that Markdown into its own configured storage. If you wire separate GBrain skills or cron jobs, treat that as a separate integration choice rather than something the Entity vault (GBrain-compatible Markdown) pack does by itself.

Power-user demo path

For a GBrain-literate reviewer, the demo target is not "OK replaces GBrain." It is:

Open a GBrain-style Markdown vault in OK.
Let an agent write/update a dossier through OK MCP.
Watch the edit land live with attribution.
Correct a wrong claim by hand in OK.
Commit the changes.
Run gbrain sync --repo <vault>.
Query/search in gbrain and see the corrected fact.

Aha moment: GBrain makes agent memory useful; OK makes the Markdown memory inspectable, correctable, and collaborative.

Cadence

Cadence	What
After each meeting	Drop raw notes into `meetings/<date>-<slug>.md`; link mentioned people/companies/concepts.
End of day	Ask an agent to create/update dossiers and append timeline bullets from new meetings.
Weekly	Audit stale dossiers, empty timelines, and compiled truth that conflicts with recent evidence.
Monthly	Run OK's dead-link audit; triage new entities vs typos vs intentional placeholders.
When using `gbrain`	Commit OK edits, then run `gbrain sync --repo <vault>` and `gbrain embed --stale` as needed.

Naming note

The starter-pack picker presents the pack as Personal CRM; its CLI pack id is entity-vault. "Entity vault" names the portable Markdown workflow OK scaffolds. "GBrain-compatible" describes the interop contract with Garry Tan's gbrain without claiming ownership of his project or implying OK is a replacement engine.